That's not my point of disagreement. I said that moving away from "autocentricity" doesn't necessarily require creating conspicuous bicycle-only markings on roadways. Many other more subtle design changes may be better or more important.

I'd like to explain how I, a formerly car-free bike commuter in grad school and occasional car-hater, and still avid cyclist and bike commuter, went from being interested in seeing bike lanes added to local roads to being a bike lane skeptic.

Many important arterial roads in NC have narrow lanes and high speed limits. I hated riding on some of these roads due to close passes when I rode near the gutter and social friction when I took the lane. Many collector and neighborhood 2-lane streets, however, had very wide pavement, e.g. 32' or more. I liked these roads very much for cycling.

When area cities started talking about creating bike lanes for safety, I envisioned more pavement width on arterials, and was optimistic. Instead, what happened is that area municipalities took the cheap way out: they added bike lane stripes to as many existing wide-pavement low-traffic neighborhood streets as they could. They striped bike lanes curbside up to the stop line at controlled intersections, striped them in door zones, striped them where residents often park on-street, and so forth. Debris accumulation suddenly became much worse, and harassment for riding more than 4' from the curb suddently became much worse. Frequent sweeping by the municipalities was now required to keep the lanes usable.

Meanwhile, those unpleasant narrow-lane arterials didn't change. But in a small number of locations, new state-maintained arterials were built with striped bike lanes. Some were striped on the right side of RTO lanes or dumped into dual-right-turn-only lanes for freeway entrances. Furthermore, the state wouldn't sweep them, and neither would the municipalities. As many of these roads became worse for cycling as might have been made better by the extra asphalt.

I still suspect that it's possible for added pavement striped as a bike lane to improve cycling conditions on major arterials with few junctions if it is well swept. Unfortunately, this possibility has been outweighed, in my opinion, by the problems created by adding the striping to the good roads we had. I therefore have soured on the on-roadway separation-by-traffic-type paradigm and prefer an approach based on Universal Design concepts, wide outside lanes on busy roads, increased availability of alternate routes, and vehicular cycling as much as possible.